About Tennant Consulting

Steve Tennant, Managing Director

If we haven’t met, perhaps I should introduce myself.

I’m Steve Tennant, Managing Director of Tennant Consulting, a management consulting firm located in the San Francisco Bay Area. We offer an unusual set of strategic marketing services to help grow business-to-business (B2B) startups and technology companies. Most clients are located in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. We work remotely with clients in other parts of the US, and with their global teams in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

My passion is working with leaders to define and bring new solutions to market — and make the planet a little better. In 2016, Tennant Consulting celebrates fifteen years of joint success with our clients. I’m proud of the trust and great relationships we’ve developed.

Since its founding in 2001, Tennant Consulting has always focused on Internet, SaaS, Cloud and high-tech startups. We have:

Worked with over 25 software and high-tech companies, including enterprise software, SaaS, storage, networking, and security solutions.

Taken companies and business units in completely new strategic directions.

I have spent my career understanding how to develop, market, sell, service and support technology solutions that help my clients address their customers’ most pressing business challenges. While I don’t know your situation, chances are, I’ve seen something close to it.

How We Are Different

We view your business holistically. While there are many consultants who are specialists for a particular function — a sales guru, branding expert, demand generation whiz who know their domain — we look at your whole business. We start with a clear identification of your target customer and the problem or challenge they have. We talk to them about how they want to buy. We assess how all your functions — sales, marketing, development, technical support, finance — align to address the customer’s problem. This means when we’re interviewing a customer about their buying process, we’re thinking about your market segmentation, sales process, positioning, competition, market sizing, product, services, customer experience, technical support, partnerships, and more. We can see what changes are needed across functions, and what’s required to get everyone in alignment.

Our strategies are concrete. We go to your workplace, or ideally your customers’ sites, to get first-hand understanding of how people are working, their needs and existing solutions. We grab a shovel, or put the headset on, or do whatever the people who are “doing the work” are doing. We see too many companies (and consultants) drawing conclusions and developing strategies without talking to their customers. With us, you get strategies grounded in reality, where the rubber meets the road.

We only take projects with a likely positive ROI for clients. We set the bar unusually high and turn away more projects than we accept. The first 11 years of my career was at Andersen Consulting (renamed “Accenture” in 2001). After that, at PeopleSoft, I worked to grow all major consulting firms’ PeopleSoft practices for six years. I spent the next four years creating alliances with world-class consulting firms at two startups. Along the way, I have observed good and bad consulting business models. I picked up a few consulting skills, frameworks and techniques. I use these to assess a new client situation, define win-win agreements, structure clear deliverables, estimate work plans, identify and mitigate project risks. We jointly make sure there’s a likely return on investment for you before we start. All these increase the likelihood of client success, and reduce risks compared to “consultants between jobs” or those without consulting firm training and experience.

We have managed enterprise IT projects. I’ve built large manufacturing systems at Ford Motor, government financial accounting systems in California and Puerto Rico, utility billing systems for Detroit Edison, and banking, mortgage and mutual fund systems at five large financial institutions. I’ve managed teams of programmers and analysts in a variety of IT environments, including multi-million dollar projects. Many clients tell me few marketing consultants they’ve worked with understand IT functions and large scale systems development, let alone program management experience to orchestrate the activities of several client staff.

We are trained in a collaborative methodology that increases project success rates. Unlike large consulting firms, several of whom tend to “steamroll” client staff, this collaborative methodology increases a team’s ownership and alignment for a solution and approach to implement it. We are the only technology industry consultants in Silicon Valley using this methodology. After using it, clients say things like, “We’re finally talking about the things we need to talk about to move forward.”

I am also an entrepreneur. I experience first-hand what it’s like growing revenues, delivering to clients, innovating, and developing great relationships. As I run my business, make my website mobile responsive, conduct events, oversee marketing campaigns, design new services, make sales calls, write blog posts, maintain a presence on social media — I gain experience that serves my clients. You will not find these attributes among the consultants from large consulting firms.

I’ve managed hyper-growth myself. If your company is growing fast, knowing how to manage hyper-growth matters. When I was at PeopleSoft (now part of Oracle), going to work each day literally felt like riding on a rocket ship. I was personally responsible for growing the alliance portfolio from 100 to 300 companies and $500M to $4B in revenues, and managing a team of 25 alliance managers. Before that, I created a new product strategy team of eight product managers, who grew a product line from $7M to over $100M in revenues in 3 years. We were responsible for the sales tools and collateral, demos and competitive positioning. During this time, PeopleSoft was one of the fastest growing companies ever, growing at 80-100% per year for four consecutive years. You operate at a different pace, and focus on different things in warp speed.

We’re interested in delivering exceptional value to you, not in keeping lots of new employees busy or maximizing some labor rate arbitrage. My vision for Tennant Consulting is to be a premier technology consulting firm based on the Hollywood model. In Hollywood, people come together to work on a movie, and when the movie is over, they disband and go on to the next project. My goal is to deliver tremendous value to my clients compared to the fees they pay me – which has them coming back for more. This means we do not have a huge staff to keep busy. Projects must deliver value to clients for this model to work. Having done this since 2001, you be the judge as to whether it is working.

We have a pretty darn good network. When your project needs more assistance than I can provide, I collaborate with a network of experts, across a variety of disciplines. That means my clients get the expertise they need, without hiring full-time employees or paying for a larger consulting firm’s swanky Class A offices and overhead. Sometimes, folks in my network bring me in to solve client problems, sometimes I bring them in. To help clients further, I founded the 5,800+ member PeopleSoft Alumni Network, a corporate alumni association of former PeopleSoft employees. My software and technology industry clients benefit from the alumni network for quick advice, additional consultants, and to augment recruiting efforts when they need more help.